Former watch company HQ
is now home to tenants ranging from an airline to a
locksmith

BY CHARLES ERICKSONCharles Erickson is
a freelance writer

April 12, 2005

On weekday mornings for most of the past 52 years,
workers have filed through the doors of 72-20 Astoria Blvd. in JacksonHeights. But the hum of a factory has been replaced by the
keyboard tapping and telephone chatter of a service
economy.

BulovaCorporateCenter, built in 1953 as the watchmaker's head offices and
primary manufacturing plant, now functions as an Art Deco office park for about
two dozen tenants.

Occupants include an airline, a spinal-injury
organization, two insurance companies, the federal government, a health club and
even a locksmith, but the watch company remains only in
spirit.

Blumenfeld Development Group purchased the building 20 years
ago.

Turning the factory into office space involved more than shoving a
bunch of desks onto the old assembly floor. Many of the glass-walled offices
look out on a atrium topped by translucent panels.

Traces of the
building's past are strongest in the front lobby, where twin staircases hug the
outside walls and curl beneath large murals depicting humankind's recording of
time.

"It's got a terrific ambience," said William Egan, executive vice
president of the Queens Chamber of Commerce, based here since 1994.

The
Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Grand Central Parkway cut across the property's front side, which has made it a
place that is well-known and easy to get to.

"The location puts us in a
good light with our members," Egan said. The chamber also uses the building to
hold meetings and conferences.

Bulova Watch transferred most of its
timepiece production out of the country by the late 1970s, but Queens remains
its home borough. The company's executive offices and service operations, still
close to the BQE, are in a nondescript low building on Bulova Avenue in Woodside.

In the
BulovaCorporateCenter, with its many tenants, neighbors separated by only a few
doors tend to remain strangers.

Sitting in her office on a recent
morning, without a single customer in the branch, Maggie Patrzalek lamented
about the reactions of some fellow tenants when she tells them about the
building's State Bank of Long Island branch.

"They say, 'Really? We have a bank here?'"
the customer service representative said.

On one side of the bank, at Sun
Cleaner, a man hunched over a sewing machine worked on a garment. On the other
side, a woman got her nails done at Salon De Beauté.

One of the newest
tenants, Gotte's Café, took over the building's cafeteria in January. Surveying
the large room with a giant watch face molded into the ceiling, co-owner Vincent
Gottesman boasted that he's learned the first names of nearly every customer and
doesn't regret not having a tablecloth eatery.

"We accomplish what you
accomplish in a restaurant with breakfast and lunch," he said.

Athlene
Palmer of Hempstead has worked at the BulovaCorporateCenter for 18 years. Her employer, British Airways, was the first
tenant in 1987.

"The inside has changed a lot," she said, standing at the
north entrance on a cigarette break.

When Palmer started working at the
center there was no atrium and no shops, and meals were prepared in a makeshift
cafeteria on the third floor.

She recalled some of the departed or
deceased tenants that once appeared in the building's directory - names she
hadn't thought about in years, like Trump Shuttle.

Palmer pointed to an
evergreen growing from a terrace next to the front steps. It is doing very
well.

"When I came here," she said, "I used to sit under that during
lunch."